Steve Jobs Remembered by Woz, Bushnell

SAN JOSE, Calif. — Think big. That was a main message from veteran entrepreneurs Steve Wozniak and Nolan Bushnell in a freewheeling session at the inaugural Create Converge Silicon Valley (C2SV) event here, San Jose's answer to South By Southwest (SXSW).

The two recalled Apple co-founder Steve Jobs and the history of the PC and spoke on the future of education in a freewheeling session. At the start of his career, Jobs worked for Bushnell at Atari whose early games machines inspired Wozniak to design the first Apple personal computers. Seeking its first investment, Jobs offered Bushnell an early stake in Apple, but Bushnell declined.

"The deal I remember turning down was an investment of $50,000 -- I could have a third of Apple," Bushnell said.

"I never heard of that one," said Wozniak, widely known as Woz. "I was not there, but I was at Commodore with Steve when he asked for $300,000 and more -- I kept my mouth shut because I was just an engineer who designed a couple computers and it seemed like an awful lot of money," he said.

Jobs and Woz wound up building a prototype for a future Atari game machine which Bushnell rejected. "I think we paid them $5,000 for it," Bushnell said.

"We didn't sleep for four days or nights so we could deliver a working system to Atari that they didn't like," Woz recalled.

Wozniak (left) and Bushnell share a laugh at C2SV.

"Steve [Jobs] was trying to pressure me to use fewer chips -- down to 40 from 50 -- so we could make more money from the design," Woz said. "I got it down to 42, but it went back to 45 before it ran well," he said.

Although he declined to invest in Apple or use its prototype, Bushnell expressed admiration for Wozniak's work on the Apple II. "All by himself [Wozniak] did a more prescient design than we did -- the whole idea of eight expansion slots was so prescient about the future of the business," Bushnell said.

By contrast, the Atari 2600 had "major mistakes," Bushnell said. Atari decided not to have expansion slots "to save two pennies each on connectors," and it put no read/write capabilities into its game cartridges. "Can you image what would have happened if we had a read/write line on a cartridge," he asked.

Nevertheless, Woz credited the early Atari machines for inspiration. "When I first saw Pong in a bowling alley I thought, 'Oh my God, you could do a game on a TV,'" he said.

Later Woz found a way to use numbers to represent colors on a screen to create a digital color display, $1,000 less than the color screens of that time. He also experimented with digital techniques to create simple game animations, mimicking Atari's "Breakout" game.

'When I first got my hands on an IBM PC, just on a whim, I typed "basic" at the c:\ prompt.'

I've got an issue with my Mac at the moment. It keeps thinking the backups (on a remote drive) are corrupted and wants to restart them from scratch. I am trying to fix this. This has involved me typing things like:

I love this quote Attoman! "Jobs undeerstood that he and Woz were building computers for non-engineers and this is what distinguished Apple for me and still does."

To that I would also add Steve's belief that his company's products shouldn't have much of a learning curve, to the point where no user manual should be needed. Just start playing with it and you will figure it out.

Since non-engineers are the vast majority of the mass-market of consumers, this is in my opinion exactly how it should be.

Steve not only understood Clarke's third law -- "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" -- but also it's corollary that any sufficiently advanced technology should be fundamentally simple to use.

"Jobs undeerstood that he and Woz were building computers for non-engineers and this is what distinguished Apple for me and still does."

Yes, that rings true. And it may also explain why I've never warmed to them.

When I first got my hands on an IBM PC, just on a whim, I typed "basic" at the c:\ prompt. Up popped the original Basic editor. Wow. That's the kind of thing that impresses me. This was a computer, not just a glorified word processor.

In 1972, I came up with a Univ. class project, "Play Tic Tac Tow" against a unit, size of cigarette box. My prof. Dr Joe Armstrong flew with Bushnell in Korean war and they knew each other. So Dr Armstrong got Mr. Bushnell to look at my project and I was given a job and a desk in a house on North Mathilda with 2 more engineers. Backyard and garage was production and living room was lobby and our desks. One of the small bed rooms was Mr. Bushnell's office. I had interviews at Fairchild, HP etc. Fancy places. So thats the way it went. luxury took over.

Apple won the first PC round in the late 70's early 80's because Visicalc choose the Apple platform.

No design of Woz (a great guy who should be honored for his role in education) had any key role in Apple's success over other local PC makers in the early days.

Indeed the best PC of 1975 (before Apple incorporated) was the Tektronix GRAPHICS computer the 4051 with integrated megapoint display, built in computer grade tape drive storage and expandible ROM pack (in which we posted full conics generator).

When I took our touch pad down to Jobs storefront operation what I was most impressed by was not the Apple II it was the user friendly literature.

Jobs undeerstood that he and Woz were building computers for non-engineers and this is what distinguished Apple for me and still does.

It's a lesson Tektronix, IBM and many other former PC manufacturers have failed to learn.

>> Sorry, not much on that. Bushnell was selling nhis new book on cultivate Jobs-like employees though.

Jobs was a great leader in his unique way. Yet, I am not sure he was a classical business leader, so studying him could be challenging. He did opposite of all the things business school will tell not to do. He has one P/L, B/S etc in Apple making the thesis that units must be run as profit centers useless. He was autocratic and secretive and was never a team person as Apple was known to be the best teamed-enclave. But he has result and that is the most important that in business.